27,000,000 square feet of retail becoming vacant??????

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Fast-growing retailer Steve & Barry's is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as early as Wednesday ...

A filing would be devastating to mall owners across the country, who ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars to attract Steve and Barry's into huge, empty spaces often as large as 100,000 square feet. Potentially all of those 275 stores could close

...Steve & Barry's was the retailer we discussed a few weeks that was using up-front fees from mall owners to fuel their rapid expansion:

People close to the company's finances say most of the retailer's earnings came in the form of one-time so-called "tenant improvement" payments from landlords of $2 million to $7 million per store.

This is another major blow to already reeling mall owners. Just today Reis announced that the strip mall vacancy rate climbed to 8.2% in Q2 2008, the highest vacancy rate since 1995.